


Look at Us Both

by Lexxie



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: ASiB, AU, F/F, F/M, Fem!John - Freeform, Genderswap, PTSD, Post-Reichenbach, Unresolved Sexual Tension, Unresolved Tension in General
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-01-06
Updated: 2012-02-10
Packaged: 2017-10-29 01:14:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 3
Words: 9,385
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/314225
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lexxie/pseuds/Lexxie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Joan Watson sees a ghost. And she doesn't even want to.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This was written after "A Scandal in Belgravia" (HEAVY spoilers), but before the rest of Series 2. It'll probably be an AU by the time the last episode airs.
> 
> Post-Reichenbach. Not Britpicked; corrections welcome.
> 
> Title comes from this bit of dialogue between John and Irene during ASiB:
> 
> IRENE: You jealous?  
> JOHN: We're not a couple.  
> IRENE: Yes, you are. (Texts Sherlock.) There. "I'm not dead. Let's have dinner."  
> JOHN: Now, who the hell knows about Sherlock Holmes, but for the record, if anyone out there still cares, I am not actually gay.  
> IRENE: Well, I am. (Meaningful pause.) Look at us both.

Three months is not long enough to undo three years of believing your best friend is dead, not long enough at all. But here is Joan Watson  -- _Doctor_ Joan Watson, lately of the Fifth Northumberland Fusiliers, a crack shot and psychopath-magnet -- standing resolutely in line for a chip-and-pin machine at Tesco while doing what she does best: soldiering on.

The business of soldiering on hits a roadblock when she happens to glance down at the three bottles of white vinegar, five yards of twine and two cans of cat food rattling in her basket.

 _Was this ever normal with us?_ she wonders. _Because now it just seems..._

She doesn't finish the thought. Instead, she glares at the items as though divining the future from tea leaves.

"They're for an experiment," Sherlock had said in response to Joan's stare. "With the cat paws."

Joan had turned blank eyes back to the five-item list he held in front of her. He had _presented_ it to her this morning as she finished her tea, presented it with that damnable politeness that had marked all of his interactions with Joan since he waltzed through the door of 221B three months ago as though he'd never left. He stood on the opposite side of the kitchen table, facing her, hands behind his back, waiting with a patience she couldn't remember him having until she finally said, "Yes, Sherlock?"

With a magician's gravitas, he flourished his left hand from behind his back, swinging it in a wide arc that stopped a few inches from Joan's face. Between the pointer and thumb fingers, he pinched a small, square and very yellow piece of paper.   _Vinegar, shoelaces, twine, boric acid, cat food_ , she read.

When she looked back at him, Sherlock's face held all the expression of an Easter Island statue. "Something to do with a case?"

He blinked. "No," he said slowly. "Shopping list."

 _Shopping list_. Arms aching, the first stirrings of a headache growing somewhere behind her left eye, Joan now wishes that she'd objected. Wishes that she'd told him to do his own goddamn shopping for once in his life, that she wasn't his errand girl, never has been,  not three years ago and certainly not _now_ , now that he's revealed himself to be a colossal bastard who lies to people about being dead. Said colossal bastard can just take his obviously not-dead arse to the store himself, because it's not as if he's doing anything else besides rearranging the furniture and brick-a-brack until they match his mental map of 221B from three years ago, and then sitting around the thus-ransacked flat all day waiting for Joan to have the mental break he's been so obviously waiting for since his return. Waiting, like the patient human being that she can't believe he's become, for her to...what? Scream at him, take a swing at him? Fall into her chair, sobbing about the miracle of his resurrection?

No. She's Doctor Joan Watson, battle-hardened, brave and too tired for this shit. So she swallowed her tea, hard. Plucked the yellow square from Sherlock's frozen hand. Stood up, smoothed down her clothes. Said, "Okay."

The man behind her coughs, and Joan slams back into her body, which currently seems rooted to the front of the chip-and-pin line.

"That one's open," the man says. Joan flicks a glance behind her. He's tall, dark and handsome enough. His chin, scattered through with stubble, is tilted toward the machine farthest away. Sherlock could probably tell what he had for breakfast, how many pets he has, what kind of sexual position he prefers with all that Joan has noticed. All she does is say, "Yeah, sorry."

Chip-and-pin machine secured, she checks her items one by one -- over the past three years, she has become an expert at the fine art of grocery shopping -- and with each beeping transaction her headache blooms incrementally wider. Of course, she forgets to buy aspirin, preoccupied as she is with the _goddamn shopping list_. Another thing she can rage silently about.

"Bad day?"

It's the chin-stubble man, the helpful-chip-and-pin man, now standing at the chip-and-pin machine next to hers with a tentative smile on his face. For the past three months, Joan has reacted with near shock whenever something so normal as being chatted up at the grocery store happens to her, when everything else with Sherlock has felt like quiet carnage.

She must be staring, because the man looks embarrassed. "It's just that I noticed your face. I mean, I...sorry, that wasn't the best--"

"It was. A bad day, I mean."

"Oh, sorry." Gentle surprise now; he didn't expect her to answer in the negative. _That's because normal people don't answer in the negative, they say, "Oh, no, not at all, a great day in fac--"_

"What...if you don’t mind my asking, what happened?"

He's more than handsome enough, she decides. But he's already issued two apologies to her one, is in the process of unloading a gallon of nonfat milk and a loaf of wheat bread from his basket, and Joan has no time for _this_ kind of shit, either. So she completes her transaction, smiles and gives him the simplest, truest answer.

"Absolutely nothing."

***

Chin-stubble man's name is Mark, a quick, sharp syllable conducive to piercing through the throngs of people who are just now exiting the underground and emptying onto the street outside Tesco to join the two of them. ("Name's Mark!" he fairly shouts at her as the crowd pushes them apart.) A lot like a bullet, is Mark, but for once Joan doesn't jump in front of it. Instead, she pretends not to hear him and aims her body toward the direction of Baker Street.

It's an unseasonably cool April day. She hooks a wrist through the loops of each of her two shopping bags, then tucks each hand into a pocket. The collar of her jacket is up, a thin substitute for the scarf she forgot at the flat. She does things like that now, forgets wallets, scarves and lunches at 221B, but she only turns back to retrieve them if she knows Sherlock isn't there. She risks veering off script, otherwise, and three months is too soon for that to be the kind of risk she would like to take. She hates the politeness that currently shields each of them from the other, but she is even less eager for what might happen when that shield finally cracks.

So, as she walks slowly home, she plans. Joan never returns to the flat without a plan nowadays, a survival mechanism she learned to adopt very soon after Sherlock's return. For every situation, an exit plan; for every engagement, a defense.

For instance, Sherlock might say, "Joan, I asked you to buy shoelaces and boric acid." And she would say, "Looked for them, couldn't find any."

Or: "You've bought us cat food, why? I said cat litter." ("Check the list. Says cat food.")

Or: "Why isn't this twine organic?" ("Should've specified.")

Alternatively, Sherlock might not say anything about the groceries at all. Joan could open the door to the flat to find him sitting in his usual chair, fixed as a gargoyle, eyes already trained on her and dissecting every minute change in her appearance since this morning. He's done that a lot lately. It hasn't stopped being unnerving, but it also hasn't caused her to miss a line yet.

If he says nothing, she'll say, "Since you're not busy, mind grabbing these? I have a headache. Gonna go lie down."

If he starts deducing, she'll respond, "Yes, true. All of it. Brilliant. I have a headache. Gonna go lie down."

A third and unlikely scenario would be if she opened the door to the flat to find him standing by the window, back to her, one hand cradling the violin against his neck like a lover, the other hand curled loosely around the bow. If she were to find him thus, Joan knows that it would be a non-musical encounter; since coming back, Sherlock has avoided playing the violin whenever Joan is within earshot. Several times, she's come home from the surgery to the sound of plaintive notes floating lightly down the steps, only to hear them abruptly silenced by the time she reaches their door.

She doesn't know what that means, but something inside her flinches at the thought that there are parts of Sherlock that he's guarding against her. It would be the other way around, if she had any sense.

In this third and least likely scenario, Joan's plan of attack is to just as noiselessly leave the groceries on the kitchen counter and proceed upstairs to her room. And if he deigns to protest, she has a response ready: "I have a headache. Gonna go lie down."

***

Joan is five more blocks to the flat when she sees her. Or, she _thinks_ she sees her. It looks like Irene Adler, but Irene Adler is dead.

Once, before Sherlock, when she was still living in that dust-colored bedsit, Joan had looked into the cracked mirror of the shared bathroom on her floor and seen not her own face, but the hollowed-out crust of a dead private's skull.

Dempsey. She never learned his first name and he never learned hers, but even without the benefit of eyes, mouth or skin, Joan had known at that second, as certainly as she had ever known anything else in her life, that the thing in the fogged-up mirror staring back at her was Dempsey.

Thirty seconds before he died, Dempsey had been exchanging bad jokes with Joan and another doctor, an American named Lia. Seven seconds later, he was lying face up on the rippling desert ground, too shocked to scream while Joan and Lia tried to pour his guts back into his stomach and gunfire erupted around them. An explosion five yards away to Joan's right threw her to the ground. She was suddenly insensate to anything but the heat and grit of the sand beneath her cheek and the roar of something large burning nearby. She screamed Lia's name but couldn't hear anything human over the ringing in her ears. When her vision stopped swimming, Joan lifted her head and saw two unmoving bodies. One was Lia's, facedown, an out-flung hand still clutching her kit. The other was Dempsey's, on its back, a pulpy mess where his face had been.

Then someone was banging loudly on the other side of the bathroom door and Dempsey's carapace was gone. The thing in the mirror had a face now, with broad cheekbones, pale lips and wide, round eyes that were as blue as the ocean in a winter storm. It was a long moment before Joan recognized it as her own.

The banging had  stopped; whoever it was must have just gone to the bathroom on the floor below. Joan had pulled the towel tighter around herself, waited for the thundering inside her chest to slow, opened the door with a hand that barely trembled, walked back to her room and cleaned her gun.

Now Irene Adler -- the thing that looks like Irene Adler -- sees her and does a perfectly executed Irene Adler move: smiles, just a little bit, just enough to make Joan understand that she knows something Joan doesn't. Joan had hated that smile on the real thing, hated the suggestion of slyness masked as mystery. It's even worse now, mostly because Irene Adler is dead.

It even moves like the real thing, with a walk that is more like a slink. The exquisitely carved face. The dark cloud of  hair. The crystalline eyes bearing equal parts intelligence and curiosity. She could be describing Sherlock, but the thing in front of her is wholly Irene Adler, and Joan aches to see why Sherlock had loved her. The thing stops just feet away from her. Joan becomes vividly aware that they are the only two pedestrians on this residential street and there is not enough sunlight for anything , real or imagined, to cast a shadow.

"Doctor Watson," the thing says.

Joan's left hand flutters once in her pocket, then falls absolutely still.

"You're looking--" It regarded her with a considering look that was all art. "Well, I'd like to say you're looking like you've seen a ghost, but that would be too easy, wouldn't it?"

Dempsey's ruined face never said a word to her. Of course, Dempsey's ruined face did not have a mouth.

Under Joan's silence, the smile that isn't really a smile grows gentle. "It's been a long time, Doctor."

Joan has never seen that look on that face before, and this is what tips her off. "You're real."

"As real as you are, yes."

"Alive."

"Indeed."

There are many things Joan could say to this -- intelligent, cutting things. But all she can think of suddenly is a moment nearly four years ago, and the softness in Sherlock's voice when he'd stretched out his hand and said _"Please."_ She'd given him that damned phone thinking it was for the best. She'd _lied_ to him, for him, thinking it was for his protection. She'd tried to purge every bit of resentment, deserved or otherwise, that she'd felt for Irene Adler because it felt wrong in the face of Sherlock's gloom. But as is typical, Joan has been laboring under an illusion, for here is the woman herself. And if she's alive, Sherlock almost certainly knows; he keeps close tabs on his obsessions. The implications...

But all Joan says is, "Fine."

Irene pouts. "That's it? Well, I guess I shouldn't be surprised. This is old-hat for me now, isn't it, dying and coming back. I suppose the novelty wears off quickly." She pauses, then says, "And how is Sherlock?"

Joan thinks to herself that this is the most surreal conversation she's ever had, and there are cat paws marinating in dirty dishwater in her flat. That was also the most loaded question she's ever been posed.

"I can never really tell," she says simply. Let _her_ fill in the blanks.

"Really? I find that hard to believe."

"I guess you can ask him for yourself now."

"I never knew you to be so meek, Doctor," Irene says in a tone that suggests genuine disappointment.

A sharp, clarifying burst of anger surges through Joan. "You don't know what I've been through," she says slowly.

"True." Irene lifts her hands in the air, palms up, in a placating gesture. "Let's change that. There's a nice café around the corner. Sherlock can wait, he's had you all this time. Let the other kids have a turn."

As quickly as it came, the anger drains out of Joan. Suddenly, all she can feel is the old hurt in her left shoulder beginning to throb and spread to her back, her temples squeezing inexorably tighter like a vise, and a sharp pain in each of her wrists where the forgotten grocery bags are digging in. Just standing is exhausting. But right at this moment, the most exhausting thing of all is Irene Adler looking expectantly at Joan like she hasn't just blown the entire world wide open by simply _being_ there. And it stings because it's an expression that Joan has already seen before, on a face that is more familiar to her than her own.

"I'm going home," Joan says, and without waiting for reply moves to walk past Irene.

A light touch at her elbow stops her. Irene leans close, all facetiousness gone. "Don't you want to know why I'm here?"

"I do but I don't. I just don't care right now, sorry. About the how or the why, any of it. I'm tired. Congratulations on being alive."

She keeps going as though nothing out of the ordinary has just happened, as though there isn't a pair of ice-blue eyes boring into her back.

"I'll be in touch, Doctor," Irene says cheerfully.

 _Of course, you will._


	2. Chapter 2

It takes Joan longer than usual to walk the five blocks left until Baker Street. 

For all that has just occurred, all that she will have to deal with in the aftermath, she is acutely aware of a sense of anticlimax. It is a testament to the insanity of Joan's life that seeing and speaking with someone she once thought dead, even someone as singular as Irene Adler, mostly just fills her with déjà vu. Once Sherlock Holmes comes back from the grave, everything else becomes repetition. 

She knows, of course, that after the numbness wears off, anger will take its place. It always does. And Joan apparently has a lot more to be angry about than she first realized. 

So she files away her previous plans concerning the unloading of groceries and begins drafting another one, specifically addressing Sherlock and The Problem of The Woman. Otherwise, she is going to blast through the flat's door with the force of a sandstorm, corner Sherlock, and throttle the truth out of him. 

A younger Joan Watson would not have found anything to criticize in that approach. And if she were honest -- which she always is, at least to herself -- a little bit of the Joan Watson she is now wouldn't mind a bomb blast to clear the air. But she thinks about the tentative way Sherlock had looked at her this morning and the careful circuit they've been walking around each other for the past three months, and knows that neither of them would survive so much as a strong breeze right now. 

The plan, then, is to approach Sherlock at the earliest opportunity and calmly but firmly present him with the four facts of the matter: 

That Irene Adler is alive. 

That there's a good chance -- more than a good one, really, good enough that if Joan were a betting woman, she'd take it all the way to bloody Las Vegas -- that Sherlock has known that Irene Adler has been alive this whole time. 

That if that were the case, Sherlock has conspired with Irene to deceive Joan -- nothing but a _fool_ for him, once again, a joke, a pet -- about this fact. 

That whatever one's reasons, one just cannot keep doing this to people, least of all the people who...well, one just  cannot keep doing this to people, that's all. 

Then she'll brace herself for his response, which will surely be composed of veiled insults to her intelligence, barbed allusions to "female jealousy," arguments supporting the rationality of his choices, and a non-apology apology in the vein of "I'm sorry if my deception and lack of respect for you has made you feel lower than the dirt under the dirt under my shoe." 

It's not the best plan -- in fact it's a pitifully threadbare, half-formed plan -- but Joan has survived madmen and whole armies trying to kill her before. This is just one more thing to get through. 

Thus fortified, Joan marches grimly home, brushing aside the nagging voice in her head that wonders if she isn't ignoring something dreadfully important. 

*** 

Determination carries Joan just short of 221B before that unnamable worry steers her off-course and into Speedy's. She orders a cup of coffee, finds a seat at a small corner table and wonders what the hell is wrong with her. 

She knows she isn't dealing with this, _any_ of it, properly. If Ella were here -- and she isn't, because Joan finally fired her soon after Sherlock fake-died, the prat -- she'd tell Joan that she's avoiding the issues, one of which is the fact that that while Joan might never have recovered if Sherlock had _actually_ been dead, she is even less likely to recover from him _only pretending_. 

The other issue is one that Joan never revealed to Ella; she barely acknowledges it to herself, except when she's shaking and gasping in the dark from a half-remembered nightmare, and to ignore it would be the most pathetic form of denial. That issue is this: If given a choice between staying dead and coming back to life, Joan would choose the former. That, as she has plenty of occasion to say, is a bit not good. 

Joan squeezes her eyes closed and tightens her grip around the coffee cup until her hands are tingling. Thinking too much about these things has never done her much good. 

She doesn't know how long she sits there, prolonging the inevitable, when her phone buzzes. Most likely Sherlock wondering what's taking his cat litter so long. She looks at the screen: _Later?_  

No, not Sherlock. It isn't signed and she doesn't recognize the number, but she knows that it's Murray. New number means new pay-as-you-go phone, which means Murray's old one is probably lost in the Thames or floating in a toilet in some crap bar or casino. And the _Later?_ can mean anything from _Want to get a few pints later?_ to _Bail me out of jail later?_ to _Pull me off the ledge later?_ Murray is a mess, which is saying a lot considering Joan lives with Sherlock and Joan...is what she is. _  
_

 _Not today_ , she types. _Lots to do_. 

Seconds later, her phone buzzes again. _OK._  

Joan envies his equanimity. She downs the last of her coffee and resignedly pushes herself away from the table, when a man's voice behind her says, "You have the right idea." 

She turns and sees Detective Inspector Lestrade, somehow looking even more grey and harried than usual. His suit is wearing over a day's worth of wrinkles and there are pronounced bags under his eyes. A folder packed too full of papers is trying to escape from under his arm. 

He looks almost as bad as Joan feels. She gives him a small smile in greeting. "You going up to see Sherlock?" 

"Yes, but coffee first, it's getting critical. I see you've had some already. Are you coming or going?" 

"Going, but I can sit with you while you drink if you'd like. I was just about to head back to the flat." 

"Good. I think I'll need you both for this." 

Joan sits back down, a little bit relieved to have one more excuse to delay the final leg back to 221B. Speedy's, already small, is starting to fill up with the lunchtime crowd. Lestrade orders his coffee and then weaves around the other patrons to join Joan at the corner table. He drains himself into the chair across from her with a deep sigh. Joan is about to ask him what the case is when he says, "How've you been?" 

Lestrade has greeted her with some form of _How've you been?_ in every conversation they've had for the past three years. Just like Murray's _Later?_ Joan knows Lestrade's _How've you been?_ is code for something neither of them has the courage to say out loud. In the early days -- she barely remembers what she did in those early days, perhaps because she did almost nothing at all, didn't eat, didn't speak, just a ghost in her own flat -- in the early days, Lestrade would invite himself into 221B without even bothering very hard to disguise his purpose. 

"How've you been?" he'd ask before rooting through the kitchen drawers. Once satisfied, he would march up to the bathroom and rifle through the medicine cabinet. "How're you holding up?" he'd say before commencing a full circuit through the flat, eyes darting gravely back and forth, looking for anything he might regret not noticing later. Lestrade is a damn good detective despite what Sherlock says, but those early-days visits always filled Joan with bitter amusement in the places where she wasn't already filled with lead. _How useless_ , she'd think, watching him visually ransack the flat, _how useless when if anything, I'd use the gun_. 

Later, when it became evident to her watchers -- which, impossibly, included Mycroft -- that Joan had resigned herself to the business of soldiering on, the question became less rhetorical and more searching. "How're you coping?" Lestrade would ask quietly on evenings when she accepted his invitation to the pub. "How're things with you?" he would start on days when he would come up to the flat to pick her brain about whatever medical questions had stumped even Anderson. 

"Fine," she would say robotically. And Lestrade, satisfied with receiving any reply at all, would leave it at that.

Much later still, after Sherlock resumed the role of corpse-whisperer and bane of Scotland Yard's existence, Lestrade's questioning became more direct. For Lestrade, the novelty of having his top consulting detective back on duty wore off quickly, to be replaced by a familiar, recurring impulse to rip out his hair. In such a state, he frequently lost any inclination to be subtle. "Haven't kicked him out yet?" he would say.

"He'd only break back in," she would reply. And so on, and so forth.

But today, he's gone back to _How've you been?_ and it throws Joan off enough that she responds honestly.

"The same," she says.

"Is that good or bad?"

"It's...it's fine. I've been fine."

Lestrade scoffs before taking a sip of his coffee. "Coming from you, that means almost nothing." He turns the coffee cup in his hands awhile, eyes roving distractedly across the table. It's a long moment before he finally says, "Serial rapist. Five in the last month."

"Jesus," she says. "Why haven't I seen anything about it in the news?"

"The victims have all been prostitutes."

"Ah." Joan looks down in grim understanding. "Well, who cares about them, after all."

Lestrade makes a noise that's too angry to be considered assent.

In the quiet that falls between them, Joan finds her eyes drawn to the entrance to Speedy's. A bell above the door rings with each person who walks through. In walks a stout woman wearing a rough, brown coat that ends at the middle of her calf. Out walks a pair of girls, backpacks slung carelessly over their shoulders. _In_ , a man in a meter maid's uniform. _Out_ , a man in a suit and a little boy who calls him "Daddy." _Out_ , a teenager who'd parked his bike against the fire hydrant outside. _In, In, In_ , two women and one man in hospital scrubs. Joan scans the faces of each _In_ , waiting for one she recognizes. With the day she's had, she's almost surprised she doesn't.

Eventually, she turns back to Lestrade. "What do you think?" he asks.

"He won't take it." _Boring!_ supplies her internal Sherlock, which she promptly tells, _Shut up_. "You know how he is."

To her surprise, Lestrade shakes his head. "I think he'll take this one."

"What makes you think so?"

Lestrade takes a deep breath. "Their eyes have been cut out."

***

The first two minutes at 221B go more or less according to script.

"Cat food? I asked for cat--"

" _Food_ , yes. Check your list."

"Lestrade, what is it? Another case? Did you get my note about the pig farm owner? It's imperative you don't let him out of the country, I suspect--"

"I'm going to go lie down, excuse me."

"What?" Two pairs of eyes swing toward the kitchen where Joan is standing rather awkwardly, two deflated Tesco bags bunched in her hands.

"Headache, sorry."

Sherlock opens his mouth either to protest her leaving before making tea or to deduce the headache right out of her, she doesn't know which, but Lestrade cuts him off.

"Joan, as I said downstairs, I need the two of you for this one."

"Yeah, I'm not really sure--"

"What," Sherlock says in that deep, stentorian baritone that never fails to give Joan pause, "is it."

Lestrade doesn't answer. "Please?" he says, looking at Joan

Joan stifles a sigh. The imploring expression on Lestrade's face is plain enough to read, but beside him, Sherlock's expression has gone from nonplussed to assessing in the span of three seconds. Joan wishes briefly for an earthquake before squaring her shoulders.

"I'm making some tea first."

"You just had some coffee," Lestrade says.

Sherlock makes a noise very much like a snort. "Don't be stupid, she doesn't drink it just to drink it."

Ten minutes later, the tea having been distributed among them, the three of them arrange themselves in the appropriate positions in the sitting room -- Sherlock sitting Buddha-like on the sofa, eyes closed, fingertips pressed lightly together; Joan in her stuffed chair, the Union Jack pillow wedged behind her lower back as though it has the power to draw out the aches from her body by osmosis; Lestrade standing by the fireplace, the over-full folder clasped in his outstretched hand like a reluctant offering.

When Sherlock doesn't make a move for the file, Joan takes it out of Lestrade's grasp. She doesn't open it.

"Whenever you're ready, Lestrade, but preferably before any of us expires," Sherlock says.

"Serial rapist--"

"Boring."

Joan closes her eyes. It would be laughable if she weren't so goddamn tired. Through the low-level buzzing in her ears, she makes out Sherlock and Lestrade trading insults, voices escalating until they're both just short of yelling at each other.

Well, she'd told Lestrade, hadn't she? She'd expected just that reaction. She shouldn't feel surprised, and she certainly shouldn't feel disappointed. But Joan's mind keeps returning to The Problem of the Woman, and the anger that she has so far managed to cut off at the pass is making another surge. To what impractical, reckless lengths Sherlock went to help Irene Adler, a perfectly capable, perfectly cunning woman who had held her own against Sherlock as well as Moriarty, Joan doesn't know and she isn't sure she wants to. But there is a monster out there _raping_ women, for chrissake, and here he is acting as though to help _them_ is beneath him...

"You'll let him finish."

For the second time in less than fifteen minutes, Joan finds herself the sole focus of two sets of bemused stares. She clears her throat, takes a long, hard gulp of her tea, and says, "Lestrade, please continue. Sherlock, please shut up."

Lestrade blinks at her then turns back to Sherlock, who nevertheless has not stopped staring at Joan. She glares back, and something in her face causes him to rear his head back a fraction.

"As I already told Joan, serial rapist, five in the last four weeks, all in Soho, all working girls. The last one was just last night. He's careful, uses a condom. No semen, no identifying characteristics, no prints. I've got--"

"What does he do to them?" Sherlock asks, finally looking at Lestrade.

"How do you mean? He rapes them --"

"Don't be tiresome, Lestrade. You came here thinking it would interest me, why? There've been no corpses, clearly, you would've said, and more importantly, they would have come through Bart's. So no corpses, but something else. Something strange, something enough to interest me." He pauses for a bit, eyes bright for all his professed apathy. Joan has seen it all before, but she can't help but feel rapt." He does something to them. He lets them live, but he does something to them. Obvious, and rapists can't help but be obvious. Honestly, they're more obvious than suicides."

Lestrade clears his throat. "Yeah, he does something to them. Their eyes have been removed. It's all in there." He gestures toward the folder lying undisturbed in Joan's lap.

"Joan?" Sherlock says when she makes no move to open the folder.

She shakes her head and tosses it onto the coffee table between them. "I'll take his word for it."

Sherlock is silent for a moment before he says, "I don't do sex crimes." He doesn't sound defensive or insulted; it's just a statement of fact.

"But the eyes--"

"Trophies. Dull. Now, if they'd all been the victims' left eyes or had had cataracts, then--"

"Sherlock," Joan says, then stops. He's looking at her again now, and all the things she has been aching to say collide spectacularly with each other before she could force another word past her lips.

Lestrade takes the opening. "This isn't just a case, it's a public service."

"Unfortunately, I'm not a public servant."

"Sherlock," he says, this time with real anger in his voice, "if you don't take this case, that's it. I'm cutting ties."

"There are more crimes in heaven and earth, Lestrade, than are dreamt of in your feeble imagination. I'm sure Joan and I will manage just fine without your distractions."

At that, something springs loose inside Joan. "What do you need me for?" she says as though Sherlock hadn't just all but dismissed Lestrade. "You said you'd need both of us. I'm a GP, not a gynecologist. And I'm not trained to be a  rape counselor."

Lestrade runs a hand through his hair, an obvious effort to calm down. "One of the girls...the one from last night. You've treated her before. At your clinic. When her friend brought her in to the A&E, she was too hysterical to know where she was. She asked for you by name."

There's a sudden tightness in Joan's throat. "Who--" she manages. Out of the corner of her eye, she sees Sherlock lean forward.

"Daphne Pryor. Seventeen. "

 _Daphne Pryor_. The name doesn't ring familiar, not at first, but when it clicks, a slowly dawning horror comes over Joan. It had been a gusty, rainy day last fall, during a shift at the clinic that wasn't even Joan's; one of the other doctors had gone into labor earlier in the morning. The first appointment she'd inherited had been a lanky, skittish girl with mouse-brown hair and deep-set eyes the color of caramel anchoring an otherwise plain face.

"Fractured wrist," Joan says. "She told me she got it camping. I taped it up and prescribed her some pain-killers. Christ..."

"They aren't talking much, the victims," Lestrade says. "But she's faring better than the others. If you could call it that. If you could get her to open up to you..."

"How could I have missed--" Joan shakes her head. "I can't force her to talk to me, but I can try."

"Thank you." Lestrade gives her a grateful nod. "I'll send Donovan around tomorrow."

Sherlock, who had been watching their exchange with an expression a few shades shy of almost-interested, lifts a finger. "Leave the file."

Lestrade's eyebrows shoot up into his hairline. "You're going to take the case?"

"It might be helpful for Doctor Watson if she knows what she's getting herself into."

"That's not an answer."

"I've given you one already."

Joan stands just as Lestrade looks ready to fire back with something irreparable. "Yes, leave it. He's right, I should have a look at it."

He sucks in a breath. "You sure?" he asks, and in the trailing note she can hear shades of his all-purpose _How've you been?_

She makes a show of rolling her eyes.

"All right, all right. Tomorrow. I'll tell Sally nine o'clock."

"Fine."

"And Joan? Thanks again."

When Lestrade leaves, Joan is all too conscious of how quiet it is in the flat. She turns back from the door, starting when she sees Sherlock standing just a few feet away from her; she hadn't heard him move from the couch. Stock-still and tall in his usual slim-cut suit, he looks like a particularly well-attired exclamation point. His face has dropped the put-upon, aggrieved expression it had worn throughout Lestrade's visit, and in its place is a look that manages to be cautious and probing all at once.

Normally, she would feel a particular fondness for that expression, but today, just for today, it makes Joan want to scream. Before Sherlock even opens his mouth, she feels a tremor working its way down her left arm, and she knows that she isn't ready for this, whatever is coming, they aren't ready--

"What happened after you left Tesco?"


	3. Chapter 3

All that Joan Watson knows of Sherlock Holmes is based on less than two years of living with the man, and that is not very long to become an expert at someone, not very long at all. But Joan knows him well, maybe too well, and up until three months ago she would have said she knows Sherlock completely. She knows his facial tics, though he would claim not having any at all. She knows the modulations of his voice. She knows his temperament on days with a case and days without. She knows the meter of his footsteps when he's excited, panicked or bored. She knows the expression he doesn't think he makes when he sees her in pain. 

She knows that he doesn't eat unless it's with company, and he eats the most when he's with her. She knows he's a lightweight when it comes to beer, but he can empty an entire bottle of wine without so much as a hiccup. She knows that it's mostly for show that he gestures so dramatically with his hands, because people are already looking at them anyway. She knows that he has nightmares because he has more trouble staying silent through them than she does through hers.

All that Joan knows of Sherlock seems improbable given their relatively short acquaintance. He was away pretending to be dead for longer than she has known him; she was away invading Afghanistan for longer still. But some days, she feels as though she has been making a study of Sherlock her whole life.

She knows it's an illusion, of course. Shared, intense experiences can create an exaggerated sense of intimacy between two people. A soldier doesn't need a therapist to understand that, though perhaps a soldier might need help remembering. So, for the past three months, in the spirit of self-preservation, Joan Watson, soldier, has been quietly recalibrating what she _thinks_ she knows of Sherlock, and the results have been...well. Some days, particularly this day, the weight of all that she doesn't know of Sherlock Holmes seems more than she can bear.

_"And how is Sherlock?"_

_"I can never really tell."_  

In the silence that follows his question, Joan wants -- _wants_ with an intensity that stuns her -- to fill the voids in her knowledge by asking him one of her own: _How long have you been lying to me?_  

But she's Joan Watson, survivor, so instead she says, "Did you really just quote Hamlet at Lestrade?" 

That is the expression he doesn't think he makes when Joan says something unexpected. "I made a few gentle improvements, but yes." 

"I always thought you'd make a decent thespian if the detective thing fell through." 

"Oh, _actors_. I hate them. They're the opposite of people." 

 _This is nice. This is banter_. The relief that tentatively uncoils inside Joan reminds her of the first time she was caught in an ambush, and of the split-second realization that it hadn't killed her yet. She lets her body fall out of attention, a stance she finds herself unconsciously striking more and more these days. Following her cue, Sherlock relaxes visibly. His hands disappear into his trouser pockets and he shifts his weight onto his left leg. _He looks like he's queuing at the bank_ , Joan thinks incongruously, and the image is so absurd that she has to stifle a surprised grin. 

One of Sherlock's eyebrows inches up, just short of the expression she has categorized as "mildly disturbed." 

"Joan," he says solemnly. 

"Sherlock." 

"Have you...is this..." He flaps a hand at her. "Are you quite all right?" 

That makes Joan want to outright laugh at him -- _that_ question coming from _that_ mouth seems easily the most ridiculous thing to happen all day -- but she knows that if she does it would only sound insane. And she's not; occasional hallucinations of dead colleagues notwithstanding, Joan is quite brutally, painfully sane. 

"Yeah, I'm fine, fine. Just tired." God, that word again. 

He steps closer, cautiously, always cautiously now. "That's not it." 

"Well, I did just learn that one of my patients has been raped and mutilated, so you'll understand if I'm a little off." 

"You've _been_ off," he says sharply. "You've been off since you and Lestrade walked in, before even that. Clearly, something happened between the time you left for the shop more than two hours ago and your little tête-à-tête at Speedy's--" Joan starts at that; has it really only been two hours? A quick glance at her watch confirms that it's barely past one. "--and since I highly doubt you would so thoughtfully proceed to buy me the cat food I didn't ask for if something disturbing had happened to you while _at_ the store, it must have happened after." 

"You did ask for it, check the list." 

" _Joan_." 

"Not yet." 

He blinks. "What?" 

Joan lifts an unsteady hand to her face, pinches the bridge of her nose."I don't want to talk about it yet. Later." 

"It?" 

"Later," she repeats. If she's lucky, she'll get away without being more specific. "And I really am tired, so I'm going to sleep a bit before I look over that case file." 

She turns away but before she can take a single step, he says her name. Part of her, a not insignificant part of her, wants to tell him to go to hell. But there's a break in his voice, so small as to be almost imperceptible, and it's enough to make her turn back. 

Sherlock is making that expression he doesn't think he makes when he knows he's missed something critical that others find obvious. His mouth opens and closes a few times, and as she waits Joan is struck suddenly by the realization that they had stood in almost this same configuration the day Sherlock came back, the day they spoke to each for the first time in three years. ( _I was trying to protect you, I had no choice..._ ) 

"I'll take the case if you want me to," he says. 

Joan releases the breath she hadn't realized she'd been holding. He looks like such a boy just now, eyes looking at anything but her, hands in his pockets, one gleaming shoe scuffing at the floor. Even when he doesn't mean to, he surprises her.  

"Thank you. I do want you to."

Sherlock purses his lips and nods abruptly.

"Really?" she says before she can stop herself. The look he gives her could peel paint, but despite everything, a corner of Joan's mouth lifts. "Okay, okay. Did you want to go through the file, then?"

He casts a look toward the kitchen. "Later. Take your nap. And I've let the paws sit a little too long as it is."

"Of course, the paws. Later then."

She gets an absent "hmm" in return before he's striding over to the kitchen sink, all thoughts of Joan and the case forgotten. She shakes her head, turns and finally climbs slowly toward the sanctuary of her room.

***

Joan is in hell. No, she's in the desert, and the ground is scorching her feet through her combat boots. Joan is back in the war, but where is--

"Watson!"

She turns with difficulty; a dry, hot wind has picked up, filling her nose and throat with heat and pelting her face with sand. Through a curtain of dust she can make out a tall, thin figure coming toward her. She squints, but she can't make out a face even as the figure draws closer, closer, closer, and suddenly the face is Dempsey's, flushed and freckled and whole. He's screaming.

"Watson, quick! Get your kit. Come on, now, over there. Hurry up!"

 _This is wrong_ , she thinks, but she finds herself nodding sharply. Dempsey bends his upper body forward and plunges into the howling wind like an arrow. Joan follows close behind, head ducked, one arm trying vainly to shield her face against the whipping sand, the other wrapped tight around the medkit that she can't remember grabbing.

She doesn't know how long they trudge; time and distance become immeasurable in this faceless sandscape. With her head down, she can only hear Dempsey moving ahead of her, his every step pushing against the ground with a quick, muffled crunch. Suddenly, the howling around her rises into a shriek that sounds nearly human, and Joan's head jerks up against her will. Through the sting of sand and wind and heat, she watches as Dempsey marches farther away from her, the line of his back determined, his footprints disappearing almost as soon as he makes them.

A strange panic grips her. She tries to call out to him, but nearly chokes at the grit that fills her mouth. By the time she recovers, Dempsey is so far away that he's nothing but a shadow in the distance, and then he's nothing at all.

"Wrong, wrong," she whispers, though she can barely hear it over the roar of the wind. She hugs the medkit tighter against her body, as though it could anchor her to the earth.

Up ahead, movement. Something is approaching, a silhouette shaped vaguely like a person. Its outline grows sharper, more defined the nearer it draws, and if she didn't think it a waste of breath, Joan would have sighed in relief. "Dempsey!" she says anyway, moving toward it.

Then, everything inside her stills. The figure is too tall, too thin to be Dempsey. Instead of dun-colored fatigues, it's clothed in something long and black. It's still too far away for her to discern a face, but something about it freezes her to the spot, even as it walks inexorably closer, closer, closer. The curtain of sand parts, and for the first time in what feels like a lifetime, Joan can see clearly.

A familiar long-fingered hand reaches out, touches her shoulder. It's Sherlock, but it isn't. Sherlock's body, but not his face or his eyes, _oh god oh god, his eyes.._.

Joan screams but her voice is lost in the maelstrom, in the high, screeching wail of the world rending itself. _  
_

***

By the time Sherlock finishes picking the lock on her bedroom door -- it doesn't take him very long, must've been practicing -- Joan has managed to adopt a passable impersonation of a person deep in sleep. Or at least she thinks she has. Her eyes are closed and she lacks Sherlock's bionic sense of hearing and smell, but she knows he's walking toward her bed because he doesn't even bother to avoid stepping on the floorboards he knows to creak.

"Amazing," he says very close to her left ear.

She keeps her eyes closed. "What is?"

"How you can be such a terrible actor even when you're doing nothing at all."

"I told you, you're the thespian."

When she opens her eyes, she finds Sherlock squatting beside the left side of her bed so he's eye-level with her face. His index fingers are pressed lightly to his mouth, and his eyes are peering at her so intently that his forehead furrows with the effort. Joan stares evenly back.

"You're doing that thing," she says.

"What thing?"

"That 'I'm trying to deduce your life story from the pillow wrinkles on your face' thing."

"Useless, I already know your life story."

"Which brings us to the question of why you're doing that thing."

In one smooth motion, Sherlock springs up from his crouch then drops onto Joan's bed with a rough bounce. She sputters in protest, but Sherlock only shimmies further into her personal space. Grudgingly, she scoots backward to give him room, then glares; she knows he hasn't taken his shoes off. He ignores it; instead, he props himself up against the headboard, crosses his arms against his chest and stares moodily at the opposite wall.

"You've locked me out," he says eventually.

"What, out of my room? It's called privacy, Sherlock."

"No, I meant--" Abruptly, he shakes his head. "Never mind. I consulted Mrs. Hudson, she thinks you might be sick."

"What?"

"Are you?" Without waiting for a reply, he lays one cool palm across her forehead. Joan forces her eyes to stay open.

"No, I told you earlier, just a headache."

"You've been napping for two hours, that's much longer than usual for you."

"That's what people do when they're tired."

"Is it? I wouldn't know."

Joan brushes his hand away and pushes herself up to a sitting position beside him. From this height, she can see the tips of his shoes sticking out from the end of her blanket. She stifles a sigh.

"Are you done torturing the cats? Is that why you're now torturing me?"

"Cat paws. And please, Joan, don't be dramatic. You can't torture them if they're dead."

Joan hums in agreement. "No, I guess you can't."

They lapse into silence, but unlike earlier, it doesn't feel strained. It doesn't feel exactly comfortable, either. To Joan, it just feels like _waiting_. After a moment, she flicks a glance at him. In profile, Sherlock's face loses its usual glacial formidability. He doesn't look younger so much as more youthful, an effect compounded by the beams of afternoon sunlight spilling through the window to land on his hair, not so chaotic-seeming now that it's shorter. Three months ago, he'd explained that having it close-cropped made wearing wigs easier, which makes sense, but Joan will never be able to shake the memory of her shock at seeing him without his familiar, unruly mop. He'd looked so _brutal_.

"Now _you're_ doing that thing," he says.

"What did you mean, I've locked you out?" she says abruptly.

She expects evasion. What she doesn't expect is for him to turn his head and look at her dead-on. Sherlock's eyes, already pale, look nearly white underneath the sunlight slanting directly across his face. Joan fights a shudder.

He doesn't say anything for several moments, as though he's debating whether to answer at all. Then, he says, "You've been having nightmares. You were having one just now."

"I've always had them, you know that. You have them too," she counters.

"Your eyes don't focus sometimes, even when you're talking to me. Other times, you avoid eye-contact with me completely. You never used to do that, never. You've also stopped yelling at me for perceived violations of decorum, except when you're too tired to mind yourself, as when you ordered me earlier to allow Lestrade to continue to waste our time."

"Ordered?" Joan says, a half-joking protest, but Sherlock shoves himself off the bed and starts pacing.

"In your terribly simplistic parlance, you've been _off_ , and I believe it's to do with...I didn't want..." With a frustrated growl he fists both hands into his scant hair and tugs. It looks like it hurts; Joan wants to tell him to stop, but she also suddenly wants to become one with the fibers of her blanket, so a stumped silence wins out.

"I never thought this would be easy," Sherlock continues vehemently. "But it seems to me that it would go rather easier if you would stop being so difficult and just tell me what I am doing wrong."  

For an electric, incandescent second, Joan feels nothing but rage. What she wants to say, what she almost says, cracks like gunfire in her mind.   _I've seen people die, good people, bad people, all of them dead before my eyes, and you let me think you were one of them. You were dead, dead, and you took me with you. You took me with you, but now you're back, and it isn't as easy the other way around. I want easier, too, but there's nothing easier than being dead, and for all your genius you can't see it._

That is what Joan wants to say, had she the words for them. But what comes out of her mouth instead, when it's finished gaping, is, "You mourned her."

At any other time, she would have found the look of naked confusion on Sherlock's face endearing.

"Who?"

" _Her_. Irene. You thought she'd died, you identified her body, you and Mycroft were _convinced_. And for days after, you were..." Joan gropes blindly for a word to describe the cerebral, controlled devastation that enveloped their flat like a pall that Christmas. "You were _less_. You were less, somehow, when you thought she was dead, and that was only for a few weeks. Don't you remember how you felt back then? How can you put me through that for three years?"

"That woman," he spits with a complete lack of guile that nearly disorients Joan. Once again, she considers his skill as an actor with admiration, but this time, in her slow-simmering anger, her regard is tinged with disgust.

_"And how is Sherlock?"_

_"I can never really tell."_

Suddenly, he is sitting in front of her, hands clapped against both of her temples, his expression verging on manic. He's held her like this once before, a lifetime ago; spun her around until she was dizzy, which she thinks is a pretty piece of symbolism. A pang of feeling deeper than shock hits Joan as she realizes this is the most physical contact they've had since he returned.

"I should think it obvious even to someone as dull as you." His breath is a warm wave across her face, but his voice is low and cold. "It was precisely because I remembered how I felt at believing her dead that I chose to leave. It was...unpleasant enough with her, and I barely _knew_ her. But you...if you were to..."

And then his hands are gone and he's standing by the foot of her bed as if he'd never moved. "It's done, at any rate. It's _three years_ done. I don't know why you insist on--" He flaps an imperious hand in her direction. "--carrying on."

He falls silent, for which Joan is grateful because she doesn't think she can take any more of his noise on top of the riot in her head. She's conscious of her mouth hanging slightly open and of Sherlock's responding look of martyred disdain. But he's breathing heavily, his stance is defensive, and that's the expression he doesn't think he makes when he forgets himself, says something more revealing than pompous, and is preparing for it be volleyed back at him in retaliation. When she doesn't, he throws his hands in the air. "Have you actually been rendered completely stupid?" he fairly yells.

Finally, Joan shakes her head. "You--" she starts before her phone begins buzzing loudly on top of the bedside table.

Before she can even make a grab for it, Sherlock spins on his heel and walks toward her door. "Tell Captain Murphy it's terribly inconvenient for you to have to babysit him while you're napping. Or while we have a case." Then the door clicks shut behind him.

***

Her bedroom seems strangely bigger in Sherlock's absence, and for some reason that she'd rather not investigate, that bothers her. Joan drops her face in her hands for a few long heartbeats before she takes a deep breath, lifts her head, and looks at her phone.

_You remember that blonde american kids name, the one from la?_

At this point, Joan lacks the energy to even frown in confusion, but she manages to type back, _Who?_

_Looked like a gi joe ken doll. He was always yelling charlie dont surf. Dumbass._

_Murray, are you drunk?_

After a full minute with no reply, Joan begins to wonder whether another innocent pay-as-you-go phone has just been lost to another unsuspecting toilet bowl. But just as she is about to consider dialing Murray, her phone buzzes.

_kid never saw it coming did he_

From downstairs, she hears Sherlock yell something that sounds depressingly like "Where's the boric acid?" and, a few seconds later, Mrs. Hudson's more muffled chastisement about the racket. From somewhere outside, she hears the rumble of a passing lorry as it lurches down Baker Street. A dog barks; a car squeals its brakes.

Joan stares down at the glowing screen of her phone. Eventually, she types, _Better that way_ , but her thumb hovers over the SEND button. After a second, she deletes that message and types instead, _Coming over now_.

Ten minutes later, as she passes Sherlock in the living room on her way out of the flat, she takes care not to look him directly in the face.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I finally saw "The Reichenbach Fall" and, yep, we're in AU land. This story assumes that Joan witnessed Sherlock fall from the roof of St. Barts and that she knows Moriarty is dead. Everything else -- the trial, "Robert Brooks," the pact with Molly (as awesome as she is) -- is null and void.


End file.
